eSpeak

On 25 June 2010,[15] Reece Dunn started a fork of eSpeak on GitHub using the 1.43.46 release. This started off as an effort to make it easier to build eSpeak on Linux and other POSIX platforms.

On 4 October 2015 (6 months after the 1.48.15 release of eSpeak), this fork started diverging more significantly from the original eSpeak.[16][17]

On 8 December 2015, there were discussions on the eSpeak mailing list about the lack of activity from Jonathan Duddington over the previous 8 months from the last eSpeak development release. This evolved into discussions of continuing development of eSpeak in Jonathan's absence.[18][19] The result of this was the creation of the espeak-ng (Next Generation) fork, using the GitHub version of eSpeak as the basis for future development.

On 11 December 2015, the espeak-ng fork was started.[20] The first release of espeak-ng was 1.49.0 on 10 September 2016,[21] containing significant code cleanup, bug fixes, and language updates.

There are many languages (notably English) which don't have straightforward one-to-one rules between writing and pronunciation; therefore, the first step in text-to-speech generation has to be text-to-phoneme translation.

1. input text is translated into pronunciation phonemes (e.g. input text xerox is translated into zi@r0ks for pronunciation).
2. pronunciation phonemes are synthesized into sound e.g. zi@r0ks is voiced as zi@r0ks in monotone way

To add intonation for speech i.e. prosody data are necessary (e.g. stress of syllable, falling or rising pitch of basic frequency, pause, etc.) and other information, which allows to synthesize more human, non-monotonous speech. E.g. in eSpeakNG format stressed syllable is added using apostrophe: z'i@r0ks which provides more natural speech: z'i@r0ks with intonation

For comparison two samples with and without prosody data:

1. [[DIs Iz m0noUntoUn spi:tS]] is spelled in monotone way
2. [[DIs Iz 'Int@n,eItI2d sp'i:tS]] is spelled intonated way

If eSpeakNG is used for generation of prosody data only, then prosody data can be used as input for MBROLA diphone voices.

The eSpeakNG provides two different types of formant speech synthesis using its two different approaches. With its own eSpeakNG synthesizer and a Klatt synthesizer:[22]

1. The eSpeakNG synthesizer creates voiced speech sounds such as vowels and sonorant consonants by additive synthesis adding together sine waves to make the total sound. Unvoiced consonants e.g. /s/ are made by playing recorded sounds,[23] because they are rich in harmonics, which makes additive synthesis less effective. Voiced consonants such as /z/ are made by mixing a synthesized voiced sound with a recorded sample of unvoiced sound.
2. The Klatt synthesizer mostly uses the same formant data as the eSpeakNG synthesizer. But, it also produces sounds by subtractive synthesis by starting with generated noise, which is rich in harmonics, and then applying digital filters and enveloping to filter out necessary frequency spectrum and sound envelope for particular consonant (s, t, k) or sonorant (l, m, n) sound.

For the MBROLA voices, eSpeakNG converts the text to phonemes and associated pitch contours. It passes this to the MBROLA program using the PHO file format, capturing the audio created in output by MBROLA. That audio is then handled by eSpeakNG.